The infrastructure that supports virtual machines consists of at least two software layers, virtualization and management. In vSphere, ESX/ESXi provides the virtualization capabilities that aggregate and present the host hardware to virtual machines as a normalized set of resources. Virtual machines can run on an isolated ESX/ESXi host or on ESX/ESXi hosts that vCenter Server manages.

The VMware vSphere Client is the interface to vCenter Server, ESX/ESXi hosts, and virtual machines. With the vSphere Client, you can connect remotely to vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi from any Windows system. The vSphere Client is the primary interface for managing all aspects of the vSphere environment. It also provides console access to virtual machines.

The vSphere Client presents the organizational hierarchy of managed objects in inventory views. Inventories are the hierarchal structure used by vCenter Server or the host to organize managed objects. This hierarchy includes all of the monitored objects in vCenter Server.

In the vCenter Server hierarchy, a datacenter is the primary container of ESX/ESXi hosts, folders, clusters, resource pools, vApps, virtual machines, and so on. Datastores are virtual representations of underlying physical storage resources in the datacenter. A datastore is the storage location (for example, a physical disk or LUN on a RAID, or a SAN) for virtual machine files. Datastores hide the idiosyncrasies of the underlying physical storage and present a uniform model for the storage resources required by virtual machines.